Uniform Resource Locaters

After the development of the World Wide Web, a standardized way of specifying site and file names on the Web was adopted. This addressing system is called Uniform Resource Locators, or URL.

A World Wide Web URL looks like this:

http://www.unr.edu/homepages/sally.html 

HTTP stand for HyperText Transfer Protocol which use HyperText Markup Language, or HTML which we will discuss later in the course. The :// is simply standard URL punctuation. The www.unr.edu is the domain name of the computer where the resource, or file, is located (See also the section on Internet Addresses later in this course). The /hompage/ tellswhere on the computer that you have connected to the file is located. Finally, the sally.html is the name of the file that you want to retrieve.

Other URL formats that you will see during this course are:

FTP:

ftp://ftp.unr.edu 

Gopher:

gopher://gopher.unr.edu/pub 

Newsgroups (Note: these URL's do not contain the double slashes, //):

news:k12.music 

Telnet:

telnet://lib.unr.edu